A drawing tool is an application that can be used to create diagrams and pictures. Visio and OmniGraffle are examples of commercially available drawing tools that include functionality to insert pictures and icons into a drawing frame. This functionality is useful in many business settings to create diagrams of computing architectures and environments, where the icons inserted into the picture to represent different applications, components, and/or hardware objects in the environment.
There are many uses for this type of diagram, where the diagram captures and records different items either currently or planned to be included in the computing environment. For example, with respect to enterprise IT (Information Technology) sales consulting, visually capturing information about customer IT environments is very important to the sales process, since it can assist to identify the type, quantity, and configuration of products that can be usefully marketed to the customer.
Embodiments of the present invention provide an improved approach to implement system diagrams. Instead of a diagram that only contains “dumb” icons, the embodiments of the invention provide for diagrams having intelligent icons, where the icons correspond to objects that have metadata about the actual product being represented by the intelligent icon.
Other additional objects, features, and advantages of the invention are described in the detailed description, figures, and claims.